If we want to find out what went on in the runup to the vote for Kaohsiung City Council Speaker, the local prosecutors' office's tactic of granting amnesty certainly has its merits -- bribed councilors are coming out of the woodwork and, as the old cliche goes, "singing like canaries." Depending on just how much of this information is ever made public, we might well end up with one of the most complete pictures of the underside of Taiwan politics in operation we have ever been able to assemble.
Of course most people on the street and everybody in the news business knows some of the details of the myriad of scams and kickbacks that are the stuff of Taiwan political life. Over the years we have seen some rich examples come to light: Taoyuan county commissioner Liu Pang-you's (
None of these cases, however, involved in-depth disclosure by those who were intimately involved. Liu was of course dead, Wu still protests his innocence and nobody now wants to touch the Chunghsing Bills case, embarrassing as it is to hopes of pan-blue cooperation.
The Kaohsiung case might therefore be a bonanza. On Thursday the prosecutor's office offered to suspend charges against city councilors who voluntarily came forward and confessed to receiving bribes for their votes in the councils speakership elections. Yesterday evening some 15 councilors had come forward, more than a third of the total, under this offer. There is no doubt that if full and frank disclosures are provided by these 15 of what they know, or even what they think they know about Chu An-hsiung (
There's one problem with the amnesty strategy, however, namely that while we might eventually see Chu An-hsiung in jail we will also be left with a Kaohsiung City Council, a large number of the members of which have admitted to taking bribes in complete violation of the trust vested in them as elected representatives, but who nevertheless will serve out their time on the city council doing those things that councilors do -- making policy, reviewing budgets and overseeing the working of the city government. These councilors have shown themselves, on their own admission, to be grossly unworthy of the positions they have, yet they will be able to continue in those positions as a result of the amnesty deal -- no conviction for bribery means no disqualification from office.
Is this justice? It is hard to see it as such. Certainly the councilors' enthusiasm for truth-telling is expressly because they can, thereby, avoid the punishment they so richly deserve. The problem with the Kaohsiung Prosecutor's Office amnesty strategy is that it produces information at the expense of serving justice. A more oblique approach might have left us knowing less but feeling that Kaohsiung City councilors' blatant lack of virtue went less rewarded.
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